Re: Distribution CPG Protocol

[Oliver Spatscheck <spatsch@research.att.com>]

Phil Rzewski writes:

 > 
 > At 02:20 PM 1/11/01 +0100, Martin May wrote:
 > >what I meant is that network lists are a good starting point
 > >(as Oliver proposed:
 > >REGION : <NAME> {
 > >        <IP>,<PREFIXLEN>;
 > >        <IP>,<PREFIXLEN>;
 > >        ....
 > >}!
 > >)
 > 
 > I definitely support this. I think it even provides a solution for the ISP 
 > example that Oscar spoke about. Let's take an example of an ISP with 
 > multiple services: They provide wholesale backbone connectivity (and have 
 > some surrogates in their backbone POPs) but also provide their own dialup 
 > service (with proxy caches right in front of the modem banks). They may 
 > attach a metric of "1" to all the prefixes associated with their dialup 
 > customers, and tell their peers that this is the supreme metric, since 
 > you're never gonna find a surrogate that's better able to serve those 
 > dialup customers than the proxy they point to. Meanwhile, they might attach 
 > a metric of "10" to the prefixes of their wholesale backbone customers, 
 > since some of those customers may be dual-homed and buy their connectivity 
 > elsewhere, so that ISP's surrogates may be as good as their other ISP's 
 > surrogates. If the CP receiving the prefixes gets this same prefix 
 > advertised from multiple places, that CP may need to use some other policy 
 > to decide to which one he should route requests coming from that prefix range.


I just browsed over the latest WEBI charter and it seems they address exactly
the same problem:

....

   a) An intermediary description format, which describes what
      services an intermediary or arbitrary group of intermediaries
      is willing to provide, and

....

Oliver